Topic archives: on writing

Picador, Australia, 9780330451369 (paperback) In The Psychopath Test Jon Ronson takes us on journey through the mad ‘industry’ of madness. And it’s not all acid-tripping psychopaths. Ronson follows leads to high-security prisons, a mansion filled with predators… and to L Ron Hubbard’s coca cola stain. What results is an inevitably open-ended, sometimes frightening and often hilarious look […]

I’ve been a professional writer for more than ten years, but it was only recently, when asked to produce a How to Write book by A&C Black/Bloomsbury, that I came to think systematically about this craft of ours. I mean ‘systematically’ in two different dimensions. First, there’s the whole area of technique. How, precisely, […]

Brooklyn Colm Toibin (Aus, US) Picador 9780330425612 Part one of this interview can be found here. Tóibín has, to date, written or edited 21 books. I asked him which had been the most difficult to write, and which had been the most joyful. He said: ‘There’s a long story in the collection Mothers and Sons which I […]

Frustration and inspiration. Sometimes one even bleeds into the other. I wrote a novel manuscript in a time of frustration, the first draft in just 12 weeks, as I saw it as a kind of ‘golden ticket’, a way through and out of my situation. Though it wasn’t (a way out) in the end – the […]

Gravel Peter Goldsworthy Hamish Hamilton March 2010 (Australia) 9781926428192 Gravel is Peter Goldsworthy’s new collection of short stories – amusing and moving – covering a range of predominantly white middle-class characters in conflict with their own egos. But there are also stories exploring erotic awakening (something Goldsworthy did well in Everything I Knew) and others where […]

I have been asked a few times lately what’s happening with this novel manuscript, as people know I’m also working on a new one. Well lit-lovelies, here’s the juice. I’m restructuring, rewriting, adding, subtracting, overhauling Smoke & Dancing this long weekend. This is the story so far, in point form (because my brain is mush after the first […]